1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to musical instruments, more particularly to mouthpieces for brass-wind musical instruments, and, more specifically to a mouthpiece having external features-such as dampers or fins-to enhance produced sounds.
2. Description of Related Art
Brass-wind musical instruments, often referred to as simply brass instruments, are the group of instruments generally characterized by a long cylindrical or conical metal tube commonly curved two or more times and ending in a flared bell. Brass instruments produce tones by passage of air through and vibrations of the player's lips against a usually cup shaped mouthpiece. Brass instruments usually have valves or a slide by which the player may produce all the tones within the instrument's range. Commonly known brass instruments are the trumpet and cornet, the trombone, the French horn, and the tuba; less well known are the fluegelhorn, the euphoniums or baritones, and the marching horns, like the mellophoniums, and the like.
In order to accommodate the nearly infinite variety of embouchures among individual players and the different types of music, a large variety of mouthpieces have been developed for brass-wind instruments. In fact, the brass-wind instrument player is faced with hundreds of choices of mouthpieces in various manufacture and design as demonstrated in The Brasswind Catalog, Fall/Winter 96-07, copr. The Woodwind & The Brasswind Company, South Bend, Ind., pages 48-56.
Different design specifications for the mouthpiece's rim, cup dimensions, throat entrance, venturi, backbore and shank are used to change or adjust the performance of the mouthpiece and hence the sounds made by the brass instrument with which it is used. For example, the shallower the cup, the brighter the sound that will be produced. The average player will select a standardized, medium performance, mouthpiece to play his instrument comfortably and accurately across the entire musical register of the instruments range. Performance quality is thus partially sacrificed for comfort, endurance, and control.
Adjustments and modifications to rim, cup, throat, backbore, and overall mass features of brass-wind mouthpieces have been used in the past in attempts to produce mouthpieces that are both true to pitch across the entire range of a brass-wind instrument's range. However, the change of one feature to affect a different result in one aspect, e.g., endurance, often conversely affects another aspect, e.g., flexibility. Generally, manufacturer's provide an assortment of combinations from which a player can pick and choose that which provides him the best average performance level. Many serious musicians use more than one mouthpiece to optimize performance based on their individual embouchure and on the particular musical piece being performed. For example, for a musical piece having many notes at the high end of the register in an instrument' range, the musician may switch to a mouthpiece having design specifications facilitating high register note production.
In order to obtain what is known as a "dark" (less piercing, less brilliant) sound, some manufacturers have introduced "heavy wall" mouthpieces, having a thick cup barrel section. A common problem with heavy wall mouthpieces is that they limit the number of harmonics resonating from the instrument; higher frequency harmonics are virtually non-existent. However, certain selected ones of such higher harmonics are desirable as they can interface and blend with notes of surrounding instruments of a music ensemble and produce a much richer quality in the overall sound, adding "life" or "color" to the performance of the group.
Another common problem with brass instruments is that mouthpieces tend not to be true to pitch for all notes throughout the chromatic scales within their range. For example, in using a B-flat, Bb, trumpet high range notes, such as the second-C above piano middle-C and higher tend to go flatter than the true octave pitch; some mouthpiece designs exaggerate this effect more than others. Backbore and throat size adjustments are generally used to compensate for this problem.
There have been a variety of attempts to improve the tone or quality or pitch of the notes produced by changing mouthpiece designs. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,395,933 (Shepley) for a Mouthpiece for Brass-Wind Instruments, an assembled mouthpiece having a cup formed of four wall sections 42-48 of differing angularity is said to allow improved player performance.
There is a need for a mouthpiece designed to produce a better and more stable sound made by a brass-wind instrument throughout its musical register range, particularly in heavy wall mouthpiece designs that are intended to produce rich, dark, symphonic sounds.